Comment by mberning | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mberning | Hacker News Reader

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Absoutely. I was similar to the author all the through college. Then I got a job, which was a brutal entry level programmer job. It killed what little social life I had at that point. But the upside was that I was pretty good at it and started making some decent money. Over time I was able to use my professional capital to switch to a company with much healthier expectations. I was able to go out and explore the world after being caught up in the daily grind for years. I was able to associate with a much wider set of people. I got 'real' hobbies to replace my 'geek' hobbies. I got a girlfriend. One day I realized that I cared more about being a good person, a good partner, a good lover, a good friend, etc. than being a good programmer/scientist/etc. I realized that the chance of any 1 person making a breakthrough contribution to a company, science, or the arts is vanishingly small. The chance to be a good person and positively impact the people in your life and community is 100%.

I'm very thankful that my experiences have allowed me to put my professional life in perspective.

Sounds like you had a bad job, not a bad time programming/sciencing.

Yeah, I did.

The point I was trying to make is that the lifestyle I led through college in some ways fed in to my willingness to do the same thing professionally. I never knew any better.

If things had gone differently, I could still be killing myself on a daily basis. And for what? The possibility of making a few more bucks?

Well yes, but that's precisely the problem: our career expectations have, as anyone who's done a job interview can tell you, gotten pretty extreme.

I left a bad job once, and for months interviewed in loads of places and didn't get any job. I'm fairly sure it was because I truly sucked at explaining away the bad job time and why I left without "sounding like he doesn't want to work."

There should be nothing wrong, in "True Scotsman capitalism" or "True Scotsman career development", with leaving a bad job if it just can't work out for you -- particularly when you're young, unmarried, and not in debt. But somehow there is. Every bad job is a black mark on you. If interviewers don't view it that way, you've often trained yourself to view it that way. I certainly did. Haven't quite gotten over it yet.

(Admittedly, after a few months I started finding different crowds of people and eventually got a contract position that could have become full-time if I was still looking for full-time work by then.)

surio, your account was hellbanned 5 days ago.

I actually think you might have the logic flipped here. The only thing that has a real chance of making a lasting impression on the world is science and engineering. Fulfilling your roles as a social person is highly ephemeral.

I actually think you might have the logic flipped here. The only thing that has a real chance of making a lasting impression on the world is money. Fulfilling your roles as a person is highly ephemeral.

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